In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 1, Document 1
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 1. Document 1 Document Information:
Memorial from the Ladies of Steubenville, Ohio, Protesting Indian Removal, February 15, 1830. National Archives Identifier: 306633
Description:
By 1830, women were joining in the emerging grassroots democracy by organizing themselves, as groups of women, within communities and across regions of the country. This petition is an early example of a petition from women advocating for a political issue. In his 1829 Annual Message to Congress, President Andrew Jackson called for removing Native American tribes from the Southeastern United States, and this petition was sent to Congress just two months after his address. The women identify themselves as residents of Steubenville, Ohio. Note, from the crossed out word, that the petition was printed for the use of women living in Pennsylvania, and that it was passed to this group from Ohio. This suggests that the petition was not merely a local expression of opinion, but that it was created as part of a larger movement. The women appeal to Congress to consider Indian removal as a moral issue. They argue that, as a morally elevated, honorable body, Congress should show compassion for the suffering of the tribes and respond on that basis.
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 1, Document 2
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 1, Document 2 Document Information:
Petition of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, 7/13/1836. National Archives Identifier: 306639
Description:
This 1836 petition shows women from Massachusetts organizing a state-wide grassroots campaign against slavery. This petition reflects the overlap of politics and religion in the decades after the Second Great Awakening. In an era when evangelical religion was prominent, the petitioners justified their engagement in the abolition movement on spiritual grounds. Slavery, they argued, must be opposed because it is sinful. The petition is one of many that called on Congress to ban the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Surrounded by slave states, the District was home to many enslaved people, and slave sales were routinely conducted within sight of the Capitol. As the Constitution granted Congress exclusive jurisdiction over the District, petitions such as this argued for Congress to exercise its jurisdiction to end slavery where it could. The women also declared their mission to their fellow women of Massachusetts. “We must petition,” they argue, until they persuade every woman in the state to join their cause.
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 1, Document 3
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 1, Document 3 Document Information:
Petition from Women of Brookline, Massachusetts, Praying that the Gag Rule be Rescinded, 2/14/1838. National Archives Identifier: 306638
Description:
This petition from a group of women in Brookline, Massachusetts (a town adjacent to Boston) bears the names of two sisters who were prominent advocates for women’s rights, Sarah and Angelina Grimke. Angelina Grimke was the wife of Theodore Dwight Weld, a Boston minister who was one of the era’s leaders in the abolitionist cause. The petition shows how women spoke out against a violation of their constitutional rights, but it also reveals that they were participants in a larger movement. The pre-printed text of the petition left a blank space for each group of signers to identify its locale. The printed text is also attached to a sheet of lined paper by wax seals. This suggests that the printed text was perhaps cut out from an anti-slavery periodical. While there is no evidence of the particular source of the printed text, it was sent to Congress during a decade that saw the emergence of abolitionist publications such as William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator which was printed in Boston and circulated widely.
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 2, Document 4
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 2, Document 4 Document Information:
Petition for Universal Suffrage which Asks for an Amendment to the Constitution that Shall Prohibit the Several States from Disenfranchising Any of Their Citizens on the Ground of Sex, 1865. National Archives Identifier: 26081744
Description:
This 1865 petition from a group of women organized by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton called for a constitutional amendment protecting women’s right to vote. The signature page illustrates that the petitioners were women from Rochester, New York City, Philadelphia, Newark, and Boston. The geographic diversity of their hometowns suggests that women’s organizations were becoming national in scale in this era. As the petitioners note, they represent half of all Americans, and that they are being deprived of political rights by the other half. At the hour of Emancipation, they argue, Congress should address this injustice. In a society whose political ideology was grounded in John Locke’s principle that legitimate government is founded on the consent of the governed, the women point out they are captives, governed without their consent, compelled to pay taxes and punished for violating laws they have no hand in creating.
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 2, Document 5
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 2, Document 5 Document Information:
Ten Thousand Petitioners Appeal for a Sixteenth Amendment 12/14/1877. National Archives Identifier: 117874758
Description:
This petition is from a campaign led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association. The existence of this group demonstrates how women acted through a national lobbying organization to generate a grassroots political movement. The petitioners call for women to gather “mammoth petitions,” huge rolls comprised of individual signed sheets that, collectively, bear the names of tens of thousands of people supporting their cause. These oversized rolled petitions were created to demonstrate the public support for a constitutional amendment protecting women’s right to vote. The petitions made the “weight of public opinion” visible. The petitioners pointed out that “…the women of the United States… are taxed without representation, governed without their own consent, classed with lunatics, paupers, criminals and idiots before the law, denied the custody of their own children and their own persons…”
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 2, Document 6
Transcript: Petition of Mrs. Amelia Bloomer for relief from taxation or political disabilities.
To the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States, in Congress Assembled.
Mrs. Amelia Bloomer, a citizen of the United States, and a resident of Council Bluffs, County of Pottawattamie and State of Iowa — the owner of real and personal property amounting to several thousand dollars, on which she is taxed without representation, hereby respectfully petitions your Honorable Body for relief from this burden of taxation — or for the removal of her political disabilities, and that she may be declared invested with full power to exercise her right of self-government at the ballot box all state constitutions, or statute laws to the contrary notwithstanding. www.archives.gov/legislative/resources
In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 2, Document 6 Document Information:
Petition of Mrs. Amelia Bloomer for Relief from Taxation or Political Disabilities, 1878. National Archives Identifier: 5752699
Description:
Women pursued three strategies in their work for suffrage in the decade after the Civil War. They petitioned for a constitutional amendment protecting their right to vote, they took direct action and voted in defiance of the law, and they petitioned Congress individually to have their political disabilities removed. Following advice published in advocacy literature of the time, Amelia Bloomer of Kansas, and many other women petitioned Congress to protect their voting rights. In her petition, Bloomer points out that she owns valuable real estate on which she is taxed without representation. Congress, she argues, should either remove the bars to voting placed upon her by the state of Iowa or relieve her of the burden of paying taxes. Along with the other women who participated in this organized petition drive, Bloomer pointed out the injustice of taxation without representation.
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 3, Document 7
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 3, Document 7 Document Information:
The Red Record of Lynching Map, 1922 (Map submitted to Congress by the Colored Women’s Clubs of Michigan to support an anti-lynching bill, H. R. 13, introduced by Representative Leonidas Dyer of Missouri). National Archives Identifier: 149268727
Description:
This petition exemplifies the work of an important Progressive Era group on behalf of a critical social issue. This map was created by the Colored Women’s Clubs of Michigan and sent to Congress in support of legislation to make lynching a federal crime. Michigan was an important destination for African Americans migrating north in the World War I years, and this petition reflects the political organization and activity of African American women in the state. As the numbers on the map show, lynching was a frequent occurrence, and its injustice was heightened by the fact that local juries usually found the perpetrators not guilty. Making lynching a federal crime would move the trials to federal court where justice was a more likely outcome. While lynching was not confined to the South, the numbers clearly show the heightened frequency of lynching in the former Confederate states, demonstrating the violent suppression of the basic civil rights African Americans in the region during the Jim Crow Era.
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 3, Document 8
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 3, Document 8 Document Information:
Letter from Suzanne Heber Supporting Keating-Owen Child Labor Bill, 2/25/1916. National Archives Identifier: 5685996
Description:
The post-Civil War growth of industry across the Northeastern states radically changed the ways of living and working for a rapidly growing, increasingly diverse population. Young children sent to work in factories became an important focus of Progressive Era reformers who argued that children should be in school instead of working in dangerous places and at dangerous types of work. The idea that childhood should be spent playing and learning was a sharp break with the traditional practices and economic needs of many families, especially among urban poor and rural Americans. This document illustrates three aspects of Progressive Era reform because it is from an independent woman who writes to Congress advocating for the rights of children. At the time Suzanne Heber wrote this petition, Congress was debating the Keating Owen Act to limit commerce in products made by Child Labor, and it was also receiving petitions calling for a Woman Suffrage amendment to the Constitution.
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 3, Document 9
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 3, Document 9 Document Information:
Resolution by the Massachusetts State Federation of Women’s Clubs against the Raker Bill, 11/25/1913. National Archives Identifier: 7268076
Description:
This document is the first page of a petition from the Massachusetts State Federation of Women’s Clubs protesting the Raker Bill, legislation that would authorize the city of San Francisco to build a dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite National Park. The proposed dam’s location on federal land gave Congress authority to decide the issue, and it was debated from 1908 - 1913. National opinion divided between granting the city permission to dam the valley and preserving it from development. At the heart of the debate was the conflict between conservationists, who argued that the environment should be used in a conscientious manner to benefit society, and preservationists, who argued that nature should be protected from human interference. Although they lived 3000 miles from Yosemite, the Massachusetts women argued that building the dam would deprive all Americans of the unspoiled natural beauty of the wilderness valley. In the end, Congress passed legislation that enabled building the dam.
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 4, Document 10
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 4, Document 10 Document Information:
Petition of the State Convention of Nevada Women's Civic League, 1916. National Archives Identifier: 169820371
Description:
This 1916 petition from a state convention of women’s clubs is significant because it shows the work of women from Nevada, a state that had already granted suffrage, advocating for national protection of the right to vote to benefit women nationwide. Significantly, the petition features a map that contrasts the states that protect women’s voting rights with those that don’t. The map illustrates the fact that Western states were the first to protect women’s right to vote. The main point the Nevada women make is that the House Judiciary Committee has been acting as a roadblock to the aspirations of women, because, year-after- year, it has refused to report out legislation protecting women’s right to vote. The petition calls upon the committee to end its obstruction. This petition shows that women were not just lobbying Congress in general, but strategically pressuring committees to act.
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 4, Document 11
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 4, Document 11 Document Information:
Petition from Minnie Fisher Cunningham of the Texas Woman Suffrage Association for passage of the "Susan B. Anthony Amendment, 5/2/1916. National Archives Identifier: 306659
Description:
The printed letterhead on the 1916 suffrage petition the Woman Suffrage Association of Texas sent to Congress reflects that they were a well-organized advocacy group. Echoing appeals for justice voiced in earlier women’s petitions, they argue that women without suffrage live in a tyranny and suffer the injustice of taxation without representation. This document from a southern state adds an additional dimension to the history of woman suffrage by reflecting the racial division inherent in the movement. The petitioners are eager to secure the right of white women to vote, but they are not advocating for the removal of race-based barriers to voting. They convey this through their stipulation that they are “merely asking for the removal of a sex discrimination” and not a “radical revision” of voting qualifications. According to their logic, the obstacles preventing African American men from voting in the state would bar African American women from voting as well.
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 4, Document 12
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives Station 4, Document 12 Document Information:
Memorial of Alice Wadsworth of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, 12/11/1917. National Archives Identifier: 595295
Description:
Alice Wadsworth, the daughter of former Secretary of State John Hay and the wife of New York Senator James Wadsworth, was one of the most prominent women in Washington society. In an expertly argued letter, she reminded a member of Congress that voting is a state matter. Federal protection of suffrage, she asserts, would rob the people of individual states of their sovereignty. On the second page of her letter (not shown here), she links the suffrage movement to radicals seeking their selfish benefit rather than the good of the nation. She argues “(suffrage) would give every radical woman the right to believe that she could get any law she wanted by ‘pestering’ her City Council, her Legislature, her Congressman or her President - no matter how the people voted, nor what national crisis existed. And if feminism can be put through by pestering, regardless of the will of the people, so can pacifism, socialism and other isms.”
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 5, Document 13
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 5, Document 13 Document Information:
Affidavit of Mary Hampton, Bolivar County, 9/17/1958. National Archives Identifier: 119652191
Description:
Although this document was not created as a petition to Congress, it provided testimony to a congressional deliberation in the spirit of a petition. In this affidavit, Mary Hampton relates incidents in which she was denied the opportunity to register to vote. Her petition illustrates how she was repeatedly denied the right to register to vote by being forced to submit to literacy tests the voting official thought she would be unable to pass. The unfair tests imposed on her were typical of the injustices African American men and women faced in southern states before the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Weeks after a voting rights march was violently suppressed by state police when crossing the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma Alabama, Attorney General Nicholas de B. Katzenbach testified before the House Judiciary Committee in support of the proposed voting rights legislation. Describing voter discrimination in the 11 states of the former Confederacy, and sharing statistics demonstrating the low rate of voting by African Americans, the Attorney General described the systematic denial of rights in the region by saying, “In short, I could cite example after example, but let me pick just one… The story of Negro voting rights in… Selma… could be told in three words: intimidation, discouragement, and delay…”
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 5, Document 14
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives Station 5, Document 14 Document Information:
Representative Martha Griffiths' Discharge Petition for the Equal Rights Amendment, 6/11/1970. National Archives Identifier: 4397830
Description:
Although the 19th Amendment was a step toward equality, women argued that there was more to equality than voting. After ratification of the 19th Amendment, advocates for women shifted their work to seeking enactment of a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights. Legislation proposing an equal rights amendment was proposed in 1923, and similar amendments were introduced in every subsequent Congress until 1970, but they all fell short of passage. Getting the House Judiciary Committee to pass a joint resolution for an Equal Rights Amendment was a longstanding obstacle. In 1970, however, Representative Martha Griffiths of Michigan led a successful drive for a discharge petition (a petition signed by a majority of House Members that orders a committee to release a bill). Her petition freed the bill from the committee so the whole House of Representatives could debate and vote on it. The proposed amendment was passed by the House, but not the Senate. The next year, Griffiths reintroduced the ERA, and finally, the proposed amendment passed both Houses of Congress and was sent to the states in 1972.
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 5, Document 15
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In Their Own Words: Women’s Petitions to Congress Center for Legislative Archives
Station 5, Document 15 Document Information:
Letter from Law Professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Support of the Equal Rights Amendment, 4/15/1971. National Archives Identifier: 26283960
Description:
Law Professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote to Congress as the House of Representatives debated the Equal Rights Amendment. Professor Ginsburg wrote in support of the amendment as a fundamental statement of human rights. She alludes to a statement by the Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme who had advocated for women’s equality as a matter of human rights during a recent visit to Washington. Since the end of World War II, in 1945, the United States had touted its leadership of human rights internationally, leadership exemplified in the American support for the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Ginsburg argues that the nation should demonstrate the same principled leadership at home. Equality is more than voting or legal protection from discrimination, she suggests, it is the emancipation of men and women, a guarantee that “every person will be given equal opportunity to develop his or her individual talents.”
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